Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen

One important objection to vaccination policies involving nudging or coercive measures such as restrictions on unvaccinated people’s access to public spaces is that they are paternalistic. This objection is weaker than is often assumed. We defend this claim by (1) introducing a novel distinction between individual and collective paternalism; (2) showing that, across a range of circumstances, vaccination programs involve collective, not individual, paternalism; and (3) arguing that collective paternalism is not wrong for the reasons that, arguably, individual paternalism is.

Derek Parfit famously introduced a now commonly adopted distinction between telic and deontic distributive egalitarianism. This chapter argues that we can draw a similar distinction between telic and deontic relational egalitarianism. Interestingly, telic relational egalitarianism might be less vulnerable to the levelling-down objection than telic distributive egalitarianism. However, while some relational egalitarian concerns are best captured by telic relational egalitarianism, other concerns are better captured by deontic relational egalitarianism and yet others relating to intergenerational justice are better captured by telic distributive egalitarianism. Accordingly, insofar as we are egalitarians, we should be pluralist egalitarians in a more thoroughgoing way than Parfit entertained.

According to a widespread view, discrimination is comparative in the following sense: for a discriminator to discriminate against a discriminatee, there must be a relevant third party—a “comparator”—whom the discriminator treats better in a similar situation. This view—the Simple View—is naturally associated with relational egalitarianism in that it implies that discrimination involves not relating as equals. However, this chapter argues that the Simple View is false. While the chapter accepts that discrimination is essentially comparative in some less simple way, it is possible to discriminate without treating anyone—actual or hypothetical—better than the discriminatee. Nevertheless, while such non-comparator-involving discrimination seems compatible with individuals relating as equals on a natural understanding of what such a relation involves, it violates the moral impulse behind relational egalitarianism. Accordingly, this chapter proposes a revisionist understanding of that ideal, according to which individuals can relate as equals and nevertheless violate relational egalitarianism. One practical upshot of this claim is that relational egalitarians can be sympathetic to a broader understanding of (wrongful) discrimination than that permitted by the Simple View.

US courts are increasingly using algorithm-based recidivism risk prediction instruments in estimating offenders’ dangerousness and, thus, the warranted severity of the punishment. Some argue that this practice mitigates well-known biases in non-algorithm-based recidivism risk assessments. Whether this is so or not, in the present US context, algorithm-based sentencing is quite likely to be unfairly discriminatory. This claim might have radical implications regarding the US penal system in general (as well as that of all other countries); to wit, that it too is unfairly discriminatory against groups with high base crime rates. If so, we face a dilemma forcing us to revise some of our beliefs about penal justice.

Many believe that, _ceteris paribus_, neurointerventions on convicted criminals that render reoffending less likely are morally more problematic than comparable indirect interventions, such as compulsory attendance at anger management classes. One justification for this view appeals to the putative fact that persons have moral ownership over themselves—their bodies and minds—and that neurointerventions violate or infringe this right. Suppose, however, that the mind is extended outside the skull and spreads into the external world. Because the most important object one owns, inasmuch as one owns oneself, is one’s mind and because claims to original ownership over things outside one’s body are much less plausible than the self-ownership thesis, the extended mind thesis weakens the attraction of the latter thesis. Because the extended mind thesis is true, self-ownership-based arguments for the relevant moral asymmetry are not sound. Admittedly, there are objections to neurointerventions not based on self-ownership, but these are less attractive, often based on contingent empirical facts, and, in some cases, might also be weakened by the extended mind thesis.

In _A Theory of Justice_, Rawls famously noted that many (dis)advantages reflect the outcomes of the social and the natural lottery. In these remarks, inter alia, some have seen the early appearance in Rawls’s work of what was later developed into a full-blown luck egalitarian theory of justice. Luck egalitarianism says that it is unjust if some are worse off than others through no choice or fault of their own. This principle differs from Rawls’s theory of justice. This had led some political philosophers to criticize Rawls for not thinking through the implications of his luck egalitarian commitments. This chapter (1) presents conflicting interpretations of the role considerations about luck play in Rawls; (2) assesses the exegetical support on offer for these interpretations; and, finally, (3) discusses what role considerations about luck _should_ play in a theory of justice in the light of recent relational egalitarian theories.

In recent years, egalitarian political philosophy has been marred by a family dispute between luck and relational egalitarianism. This chapter presents a certain view about what constitutes the core difference and disagreement between the two views. This enables us to set aside a number of issues, e.g., the role of responsibility, which are better discussed as intraluck or intrasocial relational egalitarian issues. Second, a defense is made of a guarded reductionist claim that any objectionable inegalitarian social relation can be analyzed as an unequal distribution of a relevantly related social good. Third, the chapter ends with a proposal of an ecumenical egalitarian theory that incorporates insights from both views, as well as a third egalitarian view: dispositional egalitarianism, which seems implicit in Samuel Scheffler’s work. A specific luck-ist version of the ecumenical view, which is grounded in the value of fairness, is tentatively suggested.

On an individualistic view of health inequalities a concern for health equality should also address inequalities between individuals. This view contrasts with the more conventional group-based view according to which the measurement of health inequalities should concern itself only with social groups. This chapter defends the individualistic view. It argues that group-focused views are hard pressed to explain why intra-group inequality cannot be unjust, and to explain why some group inequalities are unjust, when others are not. Moreover, some considerations normally thought to motivate exclusive concern about group inequalities—i.e. that health is not special relative to other goods and that only socially caused or remediable health inequalities are unjust—fail to motivate that concern. Finally, we need to be clear whether arguments about the moral relevance of individual health inequalities concern the fundamental principles of justice or principles of regulation. Where regulation is concerned, data on individual health inequalities, e.g. data pertaining to variation in length of life, may be of use even to the egalitarian health planner.

Intentions play a significant role in just war theory. Traditional theories of _jus ad bellum_ insist that for it to be permissible to resort to war, the intention behind doing so must be admissible. Also, standard theories of _jus in bello_ imply that the permissibility of acts of war causing non-combatant casualties depends on whether these are intended. Recently, a number of philosophers have argued that intentions should play a different and less prominent role in moral theory, including just war theory. This chapter critically assesses Scanlon’s attempt to account for moral intuitions crucial to _jus in bello_ in a way that avoids appeal to the doctrine of double effect. It also explores the deliberative perspective objection to the view that intentions bear on the permissibility of actions. This objection derives the irrelevancy of intentions to permissibility from the fact that it is peculiar to suggest to an agent that the permissibility of an action that she considers performing depends on the intention with which she will perform it, if she does. This objection is rebutted by the proposal of two explanations for this peculiarity, both of which are consistent with intentions being relevant to permissibility: (i) the peculiarity of inviting the deliberating agent to treat facts about her future, subjunctive intentions as given in her deliberations and (ii) the fact that the suggestion offered to the deliberating agent may not address the question with which she wrestles. Ultimately, just war theory may be best served by denying the relevance of intentions to permissibility, but the deliberative perspective objection fails to demonstrate that this is so.

Luck egalitarianism is often formulated as the view that it is in itself bad for some to be worse off than others through no fault or choice of their own. This formulation is ambiguous in various ways relating to gaps between individual and collective choice. When these ambiguities are sorted out it can be seen that choice and responsibility plays a less prominent role in egalitarian justice than is normally assumed. Moreover, in some cases where responsibility matters, its relevant object is not the person's being worse off, but the person's responsibility for trying to perform a certain collective action, which suggests that responsibility matters, not non-instrumentally, but as a reliable indicator of something else, e.g., moral deservingness.

Several philosophers have recently defended the view that, in virtue of holding a certain belief, we might be doing something that is morally objectionable even if our evidence supports the belief in some sense. Such philosophers generally take the moral objectionableness in question to be a personal, doxastic wrong. In the case of personal, non-doxastic wrongs, sometimes an act that would otherwise have constituted such a wrong does not do so; that is, the rights in question are defeated in these cases. Such defeat can arise either because of how the benefits of the act to the rights holder clearly outweigh the harms in such a manner that consent to the act in question can be presumed or because of what the victim of that act does; that is, they waive or forfeit the right against others that they do not subject them to the relevant treatment. If doxastic rights exist, then something similar can occur when it comes to personal, doxastic wrongs. But even if such situations might not involve any personal, doxastic wrongs, they might still involve structural, doxastic injustice. We need the notion of structural, doxastic injustice to explain the sense that some such situations are morally objectionable despite the absence of any personal doxastic wrongs. These two ideas — that doxastic rights are sometimes defeated and the notion of structural, doxastic injustice — are the two contributions made by this article to the ethics of belief.

According to Niko Kolodny, the commonplace claim that individuals ‘have claims to non-discriminatory social institutions and forms of treatment’ can be fully explained by neither appeals to claims against invasion, nor by an interest in improvement. To adequately explain the claim to non-discrimination we must appeal to the claim against inferiority. However, while the claim against inferiority explains important aspects of this commonplace, other aspects of it cannot be fully explained by the three claims in Kolodny’s triad (i.e. claims to non-invasion, improvement, and non-inferiority). Hence, by Kolodny’s own lights a deeper form of pluralism than the one embodied in his triad is needed to account for claims to non-discrimination. This has implications both for discrimination theory and for how we should regard Kolodny’s overall project in political philosophy.

While standard forms of discrimination are widely considered morally wrong, philosophers disagree about what makes them so. Two accounts have risen to prominence in this debate: One stressing how wrongful discrimination disrespects the discriminatee, the other how the harms involved make discrimination wrong. While these accounts are based on carefully constructed thought experiments, proponents of both sides see their positions as in line with and, in part, supported by the folk theory of the moral wrongness of discrimination. This article presents a vignette-based experiment to test empirically what, in the eyes of “folks”, makes discrimination wrong. Interestingly, we find that, according to folks, both disrespect and harm make discrimination wrong. Our findings offer some support for a pluralistic account of the wrongness of discrimination over both monist respect-based and monist harm-based accounts.

Discrimination is typically understood to be either direct or indirect. However, we argue that some cases that clearly are instances of discrimination are neither direct nor indirect. This is not just a logical taxonomical point. Highly salient, contemporary cases of algorithmic discrimination – a form of discrimination which was not around (or, at least, not conspicuously so) when the distinction between direct and indirect discrimination was originally articulated – are best construed as a third form of discrimination – non-direct discrimination, we shall call it. If we are right, the dominant dichotomous distinction between direct and indirect discrimination should be replaced by our tripartite distinction between direct, indirect, and non-direct discrimination. We show how non-direct discrimination covers not only important types of algorithmic discrimination, but also allows us to make sense of some instances of implicit bias discrimination.

With regard to intrinsically morally relevant factors it is natural to suppose that if a variation in a given factor makes a moral difference anywhere, then it makes the same moral difference everywhere (henceforth: the constancy assumption). Jonathan Dancy (and other moral particularists) reject the constancy assumption. Partly on the basis thereof, they infer that ethical decisions should be made “case by case, without the comforting support of moral principles”. In this article, I challenge Dancy's defence and use of a denial of the constancy assumption on three points. First, Dancy's appeal to moral intuitions do not justify denying a significant version of the constancy assumption. Second, if we reject the constancy assumption, surprisingly, it may in one crucial respect be very hard to defend moral particularism as commonly articulated. Third, rejecting the constancy assumption does not motivate seeing moral reasoning as essentially a case‐by‐case matter.

Adherents of particularism draw rather strong implications of this view. However, particularism has never been stated in a canonical way. We locate the core of particularism as a claim about how different reasons combine to generate the Tightness or wrongness of an action. Using the notion of an ordering of alternatives containing separable factors, we show that particularism can be stated more generally as the denial that there exist separable factors. With this definition in place, we show that, once subjected to a number of clarifications, particularism largely does have the implications often associated with it. However, we find the various arguments that have been given in support of particularism to be very poor. We conclude that particularists do have a point when they claim that some form of generalism cannot simply be taken for granted. But no particular reasons in favour of being a particularist have been offered.

Is it wrong to discriminate against a fictive person? We show that prominent accounts of the wrongness of discrimination provide conflicting answers to this question. This raises the question: must an account of the wrongness of discrimination, to be extensionally adequate, imply that discriminating against a fictive person is wrongful? We argue that answering “no” to this question either proves difficult or comes with significant costs. In this way, our investigation helps to address the broader, but neglected question: can wrongful (direct) discrimination occur even when no actual person is directly targeted? Our investigation thereby ultimately helps to determine the plausible scope of anti-discrimination theories.

Equality of opportunity and affirmative action have a problematic relationship. Affirmative action can seem hard to square with formal equality of opportunity, but at the same time it is desirable because it promotes substantive equality of opportunity. This chapter shows that, on some interpretations, formal equality of opportunity is compatible with, indeed requires, affirmative action; and that on the interpretations where, in principle, it rules out affirmative action, it is not a fundamental requirement of justice. As regards substantive equality of opportunity, the chapter argues that, despite typically targeting groups, affirmative action generally promotes substantive equality of opportunity across individuals; that substantive equality of opportunity can be rooted both in a concern to meet the requirements of distributive justice and in concerns about relational equality; and that several common challenges to it either can be defeated or suggest closely related justifications of affirmative action policies. Hence, the notion that societies should protect and promote equality of opportunity provides a strong justification for affirmation action in the sense that it justifies affirmative action policies for many different groups across a wide range of different contexts. This justification is instrumental and contingent, however. In some contexts, some affirmative action schemes, and some groups, affirmative action does not promote substantive equality of opportunity across individuals, and, thus, the question of whether such instances of affirmative action are justified remains unanswered.